Survival Instinct: Interview with The Knick's Chris Sullivan

Actor Chris Sullivan cannot help but chuckle
when asked about his first professional acting job in front of a camera. “I’m
pretty sure the first on-camera thing I did of any note was a TV pilot that was
never picked up called Pleading Guilty,”
says Sullivan. “It starred Jason Isaacs [Malfoy’s father in the Harry Potter feature films] as one of
these badass cops/lawyers, and I played a Russian mob member.

“I came to work
very, very early in the morning and spent several hours sitting in a make-up
chair having Russian mob tattoos applied all over my body. After that, we spent
all day shooting in this Russian bathhouse wearing nothing but towels and
beating the crap out of each other. I actually ended up getting a stuntman
stipend, too, because we took so many hits and were thrown around so much. I’ve
never seen the actual pilot and I don’t think anyone else has either, but that
was my very first interaction with a director, a camera and having Jason Isaacs
kick me in the chest.”

Despite all the
bumps and bruises that the actor probably received that day, it did not
discourage Sullivan from continuing to pursue an acting career. Having spent
six years living in Chicago, Illinois and honing his craft onstage, he went on
to do more movie as well as TV work. Currently he can be seen as Tom Cleary in
the Cinemax cable TV series The Knick.
Directed by Oscar- and Emmy-winner Steven Soderbergh, this period drama is set
in 1900 New York City at the fictional Knickerbocker Hospital a.k.a. “The Knick.”
Cleary is an ambulance driver who takes a rather enthusiastic approach to his
job. This could have something to do the kickbacks he gets for steering wealthy
patients to The Knick. While this type of behavior might sound unethical to
some people, to this Irishman it is a matter of survival.

“In one sentence, Tom
Cleary is a guy who does bad things for good reasons, and he has a moral
flexibility that I think you end up finding in quite a few characters in The Knick,” explains Sullivan.
“However, I think one of Tom’s distinguishing characteristics is that he’s one
of the few characters who makes no attempt to disguise or hide his moral
flexibility. He is what he is and he’s not afraid to show it up front and say
it loudly. Tom comes from a place of neglect, abuse and kind of a poor
upbringing, so he let that mold his view of the world. Over the course of the
show’s first season and through relationships with others that Tom builds,
you’ll end up seeing his gruff exterior somewhat chipped away at. As a result of
that, you basically discover that at the heart of it, he’s just another person
who’s trying to survive in New York in 1900, which at the time was quite a feat
if you could manage it.”

They say that
“clothes make the man,” and that was certainly part of Sullivan’s creative
process when it came to relaxing into and getting under his character’s skin.
“I’m more of an outside/in actor as opposed to an inside/out actor,” he says.
“I really draw a great deal from the environment around me as well as the
costume, but more importantly, and my biggest thing, are the shoes. It doesn’t
matter the type of project I’m doing, I always try as soon as possible to get
hold of the shoes that my character will be wearing because they inform everything
for me.

“A pair of shoes
dictates just how fast and how comfortably you move. The same is true of the
costume. A number of the characters in The
Knick tend to wear high stiff collars and heavy wool clothing, none of
which is very conducive to things like free movement. Ellen Mirojnick, our
award-winning costume designer, did some incredible work, and Tom’s clothes
really informed his posture and overall physical demeanor. The sets, too, were
a huge help. The production design on the show is so in-depth and detailed that
it makes it incredibly easy to walk onto a set and do your job.

“I have to mention,
too, the tone that Steven Soderbergh established on-set. There’s a sense of
calm that I’ve never experienced before and it makes for a very focused work atmosphere.
Everyone on Steven’s team has worked together for years and knows exactly what
his or her job is. So there’s no running around and raised voices. It all goes
back to Steven’s collaborative nature. He’s not a director who seems to feel
the need to have a ‘death grip’ on everything. For instance, most of the time
before I even got to set, I would talk with the props guys about what I should
maybe have with me in a particular scene. I’d then take our ideas to Steven and
95% percent of the time he’d say, ‘Sure, that sounds great.’ He leaves you a
lot of room to do what you were hired to do, and just standing there on-set in
front of one of the greatest filmmakers of all time was a very humbling
experience.”

Off the clock, Tom
Cleary likes a drink or two and the occasional fistfight at the local bar. At
work, he primarily deals with his assistant driver as well as The Knick’s
crooked administrator Herman Barrow (Jeremy Bobb). Cleary also enjoys trading
barbs with Sister Harriet (Cara Seymour), who runs the orphanage associated
with the hospital.

“In The Knick’s opening episode,["Method
and Madness"], there’s a lot of banter between Sister Harriet and Tom, and I
think what you end up seeing with the two of them is that they’re kind of
opposites of the same coin,” says Sullivan. “That relationship benefits both of
them in many ways other than just emotional and financial. When I initially read
the first script for The Knick, I
thought Tom was going to be one of the show’s main villains. However, as the
episodes go on, you slowly realize that none of these characters are black and
white or all good or all bad.

“That’s part of the
brilliance of what the writers [and executive producers] Jack Amiel and Michael
Begler have done as far as providing Tom Cleary and the rest of the characters
with a number of opportunities to surprise the viewers. Part of the
collaborative creative experience for the cast of The Knickis that the writers were on-set every day, working,
adjusting and rewriting certain things. Of course we stuck to the scripts, but
as the story developed, the writers saw what was going on between the actors in
scenes and then sort of bent the river a bit to complement what we were doing.

“So all I have to
say is that I think Tom’s and Sister Harriet’s relationship is probably one of
the best dramatic and theatrical relationships I’ve ever had the opportunity to
perform and be a part of. In particular, there’s a scene in episode four [Where’s the Dignity] that I feel is just
a really amazing piece of writing. Cara Seymour and I got to stand there in
front of one another and deliver these beautiful words. I haven’t seen all the
scenes involving our two characters, but I am especially looking forward to
this one and am excited to hear what people think of it.”

In addition to The Knick, Sullivan’s other TV work
includes Elementary, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, The Americansand the HBO made-for-TV
film The Normal Heart. “I only
worked one day on The Normal Heart,
and had one scene with two or three lines, but obviously the movie as well as
the stage play mean a great deal to the gay community, especially in New York
City,” notes the actor. “I saw the play around four years ago when I first
moved to New York and it was on Broadway, and to then even have one scene in
the film was quite an honor. Everyone in New York wanted to be a part of it. I
got to face off on-camera with Julia Roberts [Dr. Emma Brooker] and the two of
us had this nice little screaming match. That was certainly a new experience
for me, and not bad for a day’s work,” he notes with a laugh.

Although he acted
during high school and studied drama in college, Sullivan also pursued another
passion of his during that time. The actor spent 13 years training as a
competitive tennis player, but when it came time to choose between the two, he
knew where his true calling lay.

“I’ve always know
that this [acting] is what I’m meant to be doing, and it was the support system
I had around me of my parents, my professors and other people like that who
never made me feel like this wasn’t a possibility,” he muses. “It never
occurred to me that all of this wasn’t going to work out and I’m thrilled it
has, but I believe that at our root we all have an artist in us and we all
express our creativity in different ways.

“I think the
closest I get to a spiritual type of experience is sharing my creative self
with other creative people, and when creative individuals get together, whether
it’s shooting an episode of The Knickor
baking a cake, those are the memories that are always the good ones. The things
we remember most fondly are, I feel, when we’re creating something with other
people, and I’m just lucky enough to be part of a profession where that’s my
main job description. So I always relish any chance to do that, whether it’s
through music, theatre or being a part of TheKnickand what is turning out to be one of the best shows on TV at the
moment.”

The Knick airs Fridays at 10:00 p.m. EST/PST on Cinemax. Please note, all photos by Mary Cybulski and courtesy/copyright of Cinemax.

A native of Massachusetts, Steve Eramo has been a Sci-Fi fan since childhood, having been brought up on such TV shows as Star Trek and Space: 1999. He is also an Anglophile and lover of British TV. A writer for 35 years – 17 of those as a fulltime freelancer – Steve has had over 2,500 feature-length…